let fisgig be taught to shut doore after taile.
Tusser, Five Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie, 1580.
Wrought (Sc. Irel. n.Cy. Der. Suf.), preterite of to work: worked, laboured. Some of these old words and expressions have become so common that they must now be counted as colloquialisms, as, for instance, the phrase away with, meaning to endure, put up with: ‘The calling of assemblies I cannot away with,’ Isaiah i. 13, cp. ‘I can nat away with my wyfe, she is so heedy, je ne puis poynt durer auecques ma femme, elle est si testue,’ Palsgrave, c. 1530. Another now commonplace word is ado, which has been immortalized by Shakespeare’s use of it in the title of one of his plays. It occurs in Mark v. 39: ‘Why make ye this ado, and weep?’ cp. ‘Ado or gret bysynesse, sollicitudo,’ Prompt. Parv.
Shakesperian Words in the Dialects
In the same way most of the obsolete Shakespearian words can still be traced in the dialects. The Shakespeare-Bacon theory, if not too dead and gone to be worth further combat, could easily be completely overthrown by any one who chose to array against it the convincing mass of evidence which proves Shakespeare’s intimate acquaintance with the Warwickshire dialect. Numbers of the words and phrases which Shakespeare used, and which we have since lost, still exist in his native county, and in the other counties bordering on Warwickshire. Some of them were at that date part and parcel of the standard vocabulary, and might be put by Shakespeare into the mouths of his highest personages; others again must even then have been regarded by him as dialect, and natural only to the speech of lower folk. It is Corporal Nym who says shog for move, jog: ‘Will you shog off?’ Hen. V, II. i. 47; ‘Shall we shog? the king will be gone from Southampton,’ Hen. V, II. iii. 47. It is a serving-man who uses the phrase to sowl by the ears: ‘He’ll go, he says, and sowl the porter of Rome gates by the ears,’ Cor. IV. v. 213; and it is Mistress Quickly, the hostess of a tavern, who calls herself a ‘lone woman’ when she means she is a widow: ‘A hundred mark is a long one for a poor lone woman to bear,’ 2 Hen. IV, II. i. 35. But to classify after this sort all the old words in Shakespeare would entail a classification of all the characters in the plays, and would thus be outside the scope of this book. I cannot therefore do more than give examples massed together irrespective of the question whether they were literary words or not in Shakespeare’s time:
Bavin, a bundle of brushwood, a faggot, cp.:
In stacking of bauen, and piling of logs,
Make under thy bauen a houell for hogs.
Tusser.